I was in grade school when my mom first set up a RAID box in our house (where she ran business as a consultant). It was a relatively small thing, but she was doing consulting work on storage systems and I got to play with hardware RAID cards which was a lot of fun (I mean, I was ten and I was getting to play with a brand new Macintosh Plus, cutting edge PCs, and anything else she could convince a customer to buy for her).
The first time we lost a drive, she and I spent hours trying to puzzle out how to recover it. There is a big difference between the theory of how RAIDs work and actually sitting at a table ten minutes before school watching it slowly jump from 3% recovered to 4. I mean, it felt like the slowest thing since she was in the middle of a project and we needed the files.
After I got home, the first thing I did when I got home was rush over to see that it was only 80-something percent. That put me in a sour mood. :) It wouldn't be done for another couple of hours but then it worked! It finished about a half hour after she came home and we interrupted dinner to check it out.
That was cool.
It wasn't until a few months later that I found where it didn't work. The house didn't have exactly clean power, and 80s technology wasn't exactly as reliable as it is today, so we lost another drive. But in the middle of the RAID 5 recovery, we lost a third drive.
And then is when I realized the heartbreak of trying to fix something that couldn't be fix. Fortunately, it was only a small project then and we were able to recover most of it from memory and the files we did have.
We ended up upgrading the house to a 200 amp service and then I got some penalty chores of helping my dad run new electrical lines to her office so she could have better power so we stopped losing drives, but that's a different aspects of my childhood.
But it came out as a good lesson: drives will fail. It doesn't matter how big they are, no matter how much you take care of them, or anything else. It also taught me that RAID was ultimate fragile. It handles "little" failures but there is always a bigger failure.
Plus, history has strongly suggested that when my mother or I got stressed, computer have a tendency to break around us. Actually after the derecho and the stunning series of bad luck I had for three years, high levels of stress around me cause things to break. I have forty years of history to back that. Hard drives are one of the first things to go around me, which has given me a lot of interest in resilient storage systems because having the family bitching about Plex not being up is a good way to keep being stressed out. :D
I think that is why I gravitated toward Ceph and SeaweedFS. Yeah, they are fun, but the distributed network is a lot less fragile than a single machine running a RAID. When one of my eight year old computer dies, I'm able to shuffle things around and pull it out. Technology improves or I get a few hundred dollar windfall, get a new drive.
It's also my expensive hobby. :D Along with writing.
And yet, cheaper than LEGO.